Loved you since
by Nami Foxx
Summary: /Long before we both thought the same thing/ Edo!Gruvia


She's fearless at thirteen,

.

Clumsy legs ready to run her fearlessly out into the open world with a crooked smile to brighten the world.

She's little and _oh_ so naïve in the big bad world, her heart scrawled on her sleeve with messy red paint dripping down her frail arm.

She's beautiful in every way possible to him even as she stumbles on her words and tangles in messes he can't keep up in.

" _I want to be saved by a prince one day."_

She beams at him and he feels his cheeks warm when the back of her hand brushes his own.

He's fourteen and hopelessly in love with the star hidden in the small girl inches away, knowing one day that the princess will meet her knight in shining armor and run away on a white horse.

And that it won't be him because she burns a little too bright for his eyes.

.

.

.

She's trouble at fifteen,

.

blood shot eyes and frozen hands pulling him deep down into the cold murky water with her and he can feel himself adding sweaters on to stay warm a little while longer.

She's absolutely pale and shaken to her core but still naïve, even as they stay hidden in the alleyway, their uniforms doing nothing to keep the chill from biting at their skin while the smoke from the cigarettes she stole clouds the air.

He's sixteen and tries to be everything she wants, so he takes a puff and coughs it up just to please her even though he knows it's so wrong.

Her lips bite back into the smile he's grown to obsess over with her dead eyes and her head tilted to the side.

She lifts the cigarette to her puckered lips to blow the ashes away and he watches as they flutter fleetingly through the freezing wind down to the ground and he briefly thinks of joining them.

There's a girl in front of him, a girl who is so imperfect that she's almost perfect to him and he doesn't know what happened to her.

She used to skip down the streets with him, her arm linked with his own and her polka dot backpack falling off her small shoulders and now she skips meals and doesn't bring a bag to school.

The girl who used to steal only flowers from the warm ground and tuck them in his unruly black hair and giggle as he pouted.

But she's not anymore.

She's the girl whose lost, the girl whose eyes haunt him even when they linger away from his own and he still thinks about the cracks the once lighting that made home in them left hours later. She's the girl who steps on the daisies that once painted his hair and only runs her small fingers on the pedals before backing away from them as if they burnt her skin.

Eventually, he walks away from her – the problem and even though he doesn't want her to be the cause of trouble in his life she is and his feet are starting to ache from chasing her.

Her hands don't reach out to stop him from leaving and her eyes don't follow him out the door and he's almost glad because the burn of cold she would leave is almost worse than the warm one she left when she smiled at him but now she's so frigid and he always hated the cold.

.

.

.

She's numb at seventeen,

.

The paint that once slipped down her arm that was the same color as blooming roses is now faded into a deep blood color and falling off her skin in chips she keeps picking at.

He sees her ever so often, in the front seat of her older boyfriend's car with his lips trailing over her neck and hands everywhere where they shouldn't be or sitting on her roof early in the morning with her blue hair messy as ever and smoke in the air.

When she isn't there he still sees her, the cliché of blue eyes stabbing him in the heart everywhere he goes- the known fact that everyone loves blue eyes except him because his favorite ones hold a storm he can't contain in them.

The smile he loved is gone too and it's like she's not there at all even when a mutual friend bumps into her at the store and notes on how dead she seemed as they talked about him.

He's eighteen and wakes up in sweat wondering how a girl who is alive can haunt you like a ghost even in your dreams where he wakes up and suddenly her eyes are as they say in cheesy romantic novels; open and honest and innocent.

But zombies don't have rosy cheeks and a smile so wide their gums show.

.

.

.

He doesn't know her at nineteen and twenty or even twenty-one and he can only hope that she's okay at eighteen and nineteen and even twenty.

.

.

.

She's enough at twenty-one,

.

She's that soft knock at the door on a early spring morning and when he opens the door, his eyes still heavy from the sleep that had invaded him a few minutes ago and she's there and breathing and okay.

He stands in shock as he takes her in after three years, in a big and poofy, white wedding dress, hair half curled and tears spilling down her flushed cheeks.

But,

There's a smile: a beautiful, wonderful, cheesy smile that fits her face so perfectly he wants a photo of it in his pocket.

There are also two eyes that he almost forgot existed, shining in the morning sun with makeup smeared under and in the bags that company them.

The storm is gone and what's left is what he started with; a clear ocean with calm waves that look at him as if he's everything in the dull world.

When he doesn't speak, her small hand lifts from her back to produce one small, tiny, frail daisy tucked between her fingers.

Time stops as she lifts her delicate limb to his messy morning hair and tucks it in the black strands and he feels himself let out a breath he didn't know he was keeping in.

"Remember when we were little and you told me I was too bright for you to love?" The cracks in her voice run daggers down his chest and he finds himself nodding as she retracts the hand touching him. "I think that was a reflection that you just saw from yourself."

Her hands run down the long gown on her body and he follows them, watching as she grabs at the fabric.

"What are you trying to say?"

She stops smiling.

"You're my prince."

He shakes his head carefully, keeping the flower safe from falling just like he had when they were little and everything was easy.

"I didn't save you."

She stepped closer, the dress dragging on the ground.

"Not in the way I hoped, no. But you did in more ways then you'll ever know."

Her fingers splayed out against his cheek and he felt them both heat up at her warm touch.

He looks back onto that day and never asking where she had been or why she had showed up to his house at 10:47 in a wedding dress and finds himself grinning at the fact that when she kissed him, finally – his world brightened again like a comet finding its way through the darkness to collide with earth.


End file.
